* What is this package?

PyChart is a Python library for creating "professional" quality PS,
PDF, or PNG charts .  It currently supports line plots, bar plots,
range-fill plots, and pie charts.  Because it is based on Python, you
can make full use of Python's scripting power.

The PyChart home page is at 
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Yasushi_Saito/pychart

* What you need

You need Python (http://www.python.org) version 1.5 or later. 
You also need Ghostscript (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/) to get
information about font dimension and to produce PNG files. PyChart
runs more or less Ok without ghostscript, but it will screw text
alignment and size calculation.

If the ghostscript font directory is anywhere other than
/usr/{lib,lib/share,local/share,share}/ghostscript/fonts, you must
change the beginning of pychart/font.py (_afm_paths).

* Platforms supported

In theory, PyChart works on any platform with both Python and
Ghostscript.  In practice, I've run PyChart on Linux and Windows 2000.

* Installation

If you have Python 1.6 or later (or have Python 1.5 with Distutils),
become a root and do:

	# python setup.py install

Otherwise, manually copy the "pychart" directory into the standard Python
library directory (usually /usr/lib/python1.5/pychart). Or, you can
set PYTHONPATH environment variable before you start Python. For
example (in bash):

% PYTHONPATH=~/PyChart-1.14/pychart python mumbo.py

* Documentation

A detailed documentation can be found in doc/html.

* Demonstrations

All the *.py files in the demos/ directory can be run directly. For
example,

setenv PYTHONPATH ..
python linetest.py >foo.eps
gs foo.eps

or

setenv PYTHONPATH ..
setenv PYCHART_OPTIONS="format=pdf"
python linetest.py >foo.pdf
acroread foo.pdf

* Who is the author?

Yasushi Saito (ysaito@hpl.hp.com), a full-time researcher and
part-time hacker. This program is created mainly to serve my personal
needs to write pretty charts for my papers. As such, it is updated
only when I'm writing a paper, which happens about once every half
year or so.

Anyway, if you have comments, requests, or (even better)
fixes/enhancements, feel free to email me.

